"One of my close friends, David Hartsough, who is white, was sitting
in with a small group of civil rights activists at a segregated lunch
counter in Virginia in the early sixties. They had been sitting there
without getting service for close to two days, harassed almost without
letup by an increasingly angry crowd. As neither the sitters nor the
proprietors backed down, tension increased. Suddenly David was jerked
back off his stool and spun around by a man who hissed at him, 'You got
one minute to get out of here, n------- lover, or I'm running this
through your heart.' David, a birthright Quaker, stopped staring at the
huge Bowie knife held at his chest and slowly looked up into the man's
face, to meet 'the worst look of hate I have ever seen in my life.' The
thought that came to him was, 'Well, at least I've got a minute,' and
he heard himself saying to the man, 'Well, brother, you do what you
feel you have to, and I'm going to try to love you all the same.' For a
few frozen seconds there seemed to be no reaction; then the hand on the
knife started shaking. After a few more long seconds it dropped. The
man turned and walked out of the lunchroom, surreptitiously wiping a
tear from his cheek."

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Whatever Hartsough did in the days and weeks and years following
this incident, it was not to bemoan life's supposed lack of meaning.
Nor did he do that in the months leading up to the incident, during
which he clearly prepared himself to respond to the "wind of hate" (as
soldiers describe it in war) in his chosen way without having to stop
and think about it. He heard himself saying the words that saved his
life and improved the lives around him, just as a properly conditioned
soldier watches himself fire a weapon in the heat of battle. But there
is a drastic difference: the soldier who fires the weapon is usually
himself traumatized by having done so. He has to recover afterwards.
Veterans' suicide rates suggest that many never do. The "meaning"
violent actors have found in war is fleeting. A nonviolent activist is
empowered by his or her action, and need not recover from it. In fact,
those confronted by nonviolent activism can be empowered by it as well.
Many more Egyptian young people and Egyptian soldiers will tell you
life has meaning right now than would have said so last year, and that
meaning will leave no hangover. Instead it will fade slowly or last as
long as the nonviolent activism continues. When young Palestinians took
up nonviolent resistance, their usage of drugs and alcohol plummeted.
Does anyone doubt that same effect could be found right now in Madison,
Wisconsin?

When I speak about peace and justice, people always ask what they
can do and often ask for an easy solution. When I tell them that our
entire system is deeply corrupt, that we need a cultural revolution and
a massive movement for change, that until Freedom Plaza in DC looks
like Tahrir Square in Cairo all changes are going to be cosmetic or for
the worse, people often look disappointed or discouraged. They don't
understand (and I have failed to communicate) that I am offering them
what people have longed for since the beginning of time and desperately
craved and lacked since the beginning of television: I'm offering a
life with meaning. Why do people pick up harmful addictions, risk life
and limb for no purpose but the risk, try their hardest to believe in
theology and astrology and all variety of nonsense? Why all the quiet
-- and sometimes not so quiet -- desperation? It is because people do
not believe their lives can have a larger purpose, do not believe they
can struggle and sacrifice in solidarity with friends and strangers to
improve everything for everyone for centuries to come. And yet, of
course, they can and must or all will be lost.

Nagler's book "The Search for a Nonviolent Future" makes the case
that nonviolence and only nonviolence can work, not only work as a
fulfilling career for those who practice it, but work in halting wars
and injustices. When violence seems to accomplish such ends, the
blowback can be swift or slow but is always lingering. When nonviolence
seems to fail, it always makes progress, and most failures of
nonviolent activism are failures of actions taken with no training
whatsoever or of sheer inaction (which our worse-than-useless
educational system leaves people confusing with nonviolent action).
Yet, the victories won through spontaneous actions by untrained and
undisciplined nonviolent actors suggest the incredible potential still
largely untapped. The Kapp Putch was stopped in Germany. The Soviet
occupation in the Prague Spring was frustrated for months and the
groundwork laid for its overthrow. The Rosenstrasse Prison
Demonstration overpowered the Nazis, won its participants' demands, and
then disbanded. What if these movements that won victories through
nonviolent action had continued and broadened and advanced
strategically toward larger goals, as we are all now hoping the
people's movements in Egypt and around the Middle East, Puerto Rico,
and the United States are able to do? What if Wall Street had spent the
thirties and forties investing in nonviolence training in Germany
rather than in weapons and eugenics?

What if people were trained to travel as rapid response teams to use
nonviolence in areas of crisis around the globe? They have been for
decades now, with stunning success. They have put their lives on the
line without weapons or the threat of weapons, accomplished more, and
yet been killed and injured far, far less than soldiers who shoot to
kill or U.N. peace keepers who threaten to shoot to kill if "needed."
In the early eighties, the minister of war ("defense") of Nicaragua,
Ernesto Cardenal, learned that peace activists protecting villages by
their nonviolent presence provided far greater protection than he
could. He told Nagler and a group of people, speaking through a
translator that wherever these small groups of international activists
were, there was no violence. His translator "corrected" his comment and
said "nearly no violence." Cardenal "caught that at once and slammed
his fist on the table: 'I said, absolutely no violence!'"

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Peace studies should be required in every college and every high
school and every elementary and pre-school. All those years and decades
of blankness in between the wars should be filled in in our history
books, and we should invest in nonviolence training instead of war. I
like to fantasize about bills that could be introduced in Congress. I'd
like to see a bill forbidding the United States to spend more on its
military than three times the nearest nation behind it. This would
require massive cuts to the Pentagon immediately. But what about a bill
requiring that the military receive no more than 1,000 times the
funding appropriated for nonviolence training and peace? Of course, the
trend is in the other direction. The military gets more money and a
larger share of the money every year, and Congress is working to defund
the US Institute of Peace, Americorps, and the United Nations. But
those were not what we really needed. And we don't really need the
government to do what is needed. We need to do it ourselves.

We need to build peace teams for domestic and international work,
teams that include independent journalism as part of their activities.
We need to invest everything we can in such work. Here's one example of
a place to get started. Here's something happening all over the United States next week. Here's that chance to bring Cairo and peace to DC. Here are more activities planned in the near future that you can get involved in.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)